WHAT TO EAT

Today I had to call a patient who had requested to see a nutritionist. She had been told by her doctor that she had pre-diabetes, and wanted to learn about what to eat.

Pre-diabetes means your poor besieged-by sugar-and-processed-junk pancreas is flagging a little on the insulin production, and your red blood cells (along with most of the rest of your body) are slowly being coated with sugar, or “glycosylated.” Full blown diabetes is when your pancreas is shot or nearly so, and you need pills or insulin injections not to get really sick from the level of sugar in your blood. Insulin, by the way, is the hormone your body makes that, in a nut shell, gets your cells to move sugar out of your blood and into storage when there’s excess around.

I gave the patient the referral, but I also talked to her for a while. What to eat? Well, pre-diabetes is reversible, so literally, cut the crap, and eat what every one of us should be eating.

Lots of green veggies, whole grains like quinoa, millet, and unprocessed oats, nuts, plain yoghurt, olive oil, seeds, a little fresh fruit, fish, a little lean chicken and meat if you eat meat but not much. And, as I tell all my patients, “If it came wrapped in plastic, tin foil, Styrofoam, or tin, it didn’t come out of the ground that way and it wasn’t made by God so don’t eat it.” (I have no idea where I got the “God” thing but I think it sounds sort of final and fatalistic to say, and people seem to dig it – their eyes widen in fear or they laugh, so I know they are at least listening.)

There’s more to food than this of course, but if you start there you are in a good spot.

About Robin

I am a functional medicine doctor practicing in New York City. This means that I not only diagnose and treat disease, I look at the whole person, listen to my patients’ stories, and work to find the root cause of their symptoms.